


Closet Case: The Story of My Life

by ofshadowsandstars



Series: Amerique [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amerique AU, Documentary style, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mock Article, Teen Pregnancy, americawashington au, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9838925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofshadowsandstars/pseuds/ofshadowsandstars
Summary: A recollection of John Laurens' tell-all TV special.((part of the americawashington AU on tumblr))





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

  * For [My Followers](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=My+Followers).



Written by Kay Warren for _Never Satisfied News_

February 15, 2017

* * *

 

For the past half-decade, John Laurens has been making America laugh on the regular along with his ragtag handful of comedians on _The Story of Tonight_ and on Twitter and Instagram, where he regularly posts about the shenanigans of his boyfriend, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. However, last night, he made America cry for the first time. There were about a dozen Never Satisfied News employees in the office last night with me when I watched _Closet Case: The Story of My Life_ , and by the end, not one of them had a dry eye, myself included. This eighty-two-minute short broadcast on CNN was a heartrendingly, unflinchingly honest autobiographical narrative brilliantly crafted by Laurens, Anderson Cooper, and _Story of Tonight_ second-in-command Peggy Schuyler. Not only does it completely flip one’s view on John Laurens as a man, but it makes their respect for him increase dramatically.

The short begins with a voiceover from Laurens himself. He introduces himself, then lists his place and time of birth, as well as his weight: standard baby details. As he speaks, the screen fills with several grainy, faded pictures clearly from decades’ past. The first is a woman holding a baby, then shots of just the baby or it and the woman again. The screen fills, fades back to black, and then a single image shows up. The baby is sitting on a man’s lap, grinning ecstatically, holding his hands up in the air. The man’s face is not shown. Just as the lone image begins to fade, Laurens’ voice reappears and says, _“This is my story.”_

In classic documentary style, the film begins out in the countryside. Laurens is sitting out on the lawn at Mount Vernon, President Washington’s family home, and he’s playing with Philip, the adopted son of Eliza and Alexander Hamilton. The baby is clearly working on standing up straight on his own, and Laurens has his hands at the ready on either side of him, prepared to catch if need be. Laurens looks at the child with the utmost adoration and affection. The sight, as imaginable, is heartwarming and endearing beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

“The youngest of my siblings was his age when my mom died,” Laurens says. “Younger, actually. My mom got sick when I was fifteen, died right before my sixteenth. Ellie wasn’t even a year. She was hardly a toddler when I left home. She’ll be almost twenty now.”

The image then shifts to Laurens carrying a sleeping Philip across the lawn, one of the Washingtons’ dogs trotting at his heels.

“Sometimes I feel kinda guilty thinking of this place as a second home,” Laurens’ voice admits as he climbs the steps to the porch of Mount Vernon. “But there’s just something about these people that’s the perfect mix of Northern and Southern for me, and the Washingtons are just inherently parents. There’s no other way to describe them.”

“Let’s start at the very beginning,” says Anderson Cooper. He and Laurens are sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of Mount Vernon, looking out on a field where a number of sheep, cows, and goats are grazing in separate pastures.

“A very good place to start,” Laurens replies in singsong - a terrible impression of Julie Andrews from _The Sound of Music_ , but a comedian’s reflex cannot be helped. At the very least, Anderson Cooper liked it.

Over the next ten to twelve minutes, Laurens tells the story of the first decade of his life, from being a young senator’s son to being the eldest of an ever-growing horde of children to his childhood hijinks. Apparently, comedy was not Laurens’ first calling, as he explains in the story of how he would go out into the woods in search of bird’s nests, squirrel caches, rabbit holes, and more. His favorite, however, was going out to ponds to look for salamanders, frogs, and - most importantly, as far as he’s concerned - turtles. In fact, he spends the better part of two minutes (yes, we timed it) talking about his childhood adoration of turtles and how it has carried on into his adulthood. This love of his, however, came much to the dismay of his father.

“He was your standard kind of manly-man, you know?” Laurens asks rhetorically. He and Cooper are walking along a Mount Vernon pasture, a different dog a few yards ahead. “He went to law school, of course, so he wasn’t a redneck, so to speak, but he was very firmly masculine. I would fix leaks and help with barbecue and play in the mud, but god forbid I wash a dish. Whenever I did something he didn’t quite like, he’d say: ‘Jacky, you’re a man. Men don’t do that.’ The earliest I can remember hearing that is at five years old. I was upset about having to share my mom with a baby sister. Anyway, my dad would have been fine with my roaming had it not been for the fact that I wasn’t trying to catch anything. Apparently, it’s a crime to observe frogs going about doing their thing. Same goes for leaving bird’s nests alone.”

Henry Laurens, to his credit, did not discourage his son from going outside, exploring, and being curious. He just wouldn’t have minded if little John brought back the odd frog or two. “Normal kid stuff”, as Laurens remarked with a chuckle.

“Which, really, I find hilarious given that my dad _hated_ frogs. One jumped into his sandwich once when he was a kid and he’s been traumatized ever since,” Laurens says with a laugh. “He just thought it woulda taken my boy-ness up a couple notches!” Cooper and Laurens share a laugh.


	2. Act II, Scene I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Personal history - the adolescent years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mentions of racist/homophobic language.

After the commercial came the good stuff - or rather, what we were all waiting for: the conversation on John Laurens’ sexuality. Now in the dining room at Mount Vernon, he flips through a photo album with Cooper and points out pictures to him as a voiceover addresses the audience.

“From 7th through 9th grade, I went to a private boy’s school in Switzerland. Why Switzerland? I have no idea.”

But therein lay a whole new world of discovery for young John Laurens. At the boarding school he attended, he roomed with a boy by the name of Francis Kinloch. Kinloch, coincidentally enough, was also a South Carolinian, and the two had met previously, but they did not become serious friends until they were stuck together in Geneva. But, once united, they were never apart. As he had promised, Laurens tells the story of his and Kinloch’s relationship quite plainly. It started as a schoolboy crush, though Laurens admitted that he had never had one before and was unaware of what it was he was feeling, but Kinloch did reciprocate.

“It was totally middle school,” says Laurens (no longer a voiceover) with a sad laugh. “Very shy, very awkward. Coming from conservative families, neither of us were sure what was happening or where to go from when we admitted our feelings. So we settled for subtlety. Always sitting close, bumping shoulders, linking a finger or two when no one was around. Like I said, very middle school, but it was sweet. It was good what we had those few years.

“Then there was the time Francis had to fly home for his aunt’s funeral. He was gone about a week, but I missed him like crazy. I kept a record of everything that happened while he was away so I could fill him in completely.” Laurens sighs heavily, slouching into his chair. From across the table, Eliza Schuyler-Hamilton (yes, she’s there; people come in and out of this movie faster than we can take note) reaches over and squeezes his hand. Squeezing back, Laurens takes a deep breath and continues.

“I’ll never know what happened when he went home. All I know is that when I came back, he was distant. He was closed off, defensive, irritable, and shied away from touch. We had a lot of fights in those last few months at boarding school. We actually got split up, the arguments got so bad. I never knew when to stop as a kid, so I kept pushing and pushing for him to tell me what went wrong, why he wouldn’t talk to me or look me in the eye. And then I got what I wanted, and he snapped.” Laurens takes a shaky breath, squeezing Schuyler’s hand and balling the other into a fist. “He started spouting all these insults at me. Going on about how I was loud and obnoxious and didn’t know how to shut up - all things I knew - until it went South. And I mean that in more than one way. He started spitting out slurs. Racist, homophobic, sexist, the works. It was like a volcano spewing daggers in my face. I had my best friend scream at me that I was a freak of nature, a piece of scum that deserved a horrible, grimy death, and that I wouldn’t get into heaven because I was gay.” Laurens takes a moment to gather himself, kissing the back of Schuyler’s knuckles gratefully and wiping at teary eyes. “So naturally,” he says in a still pained but lighter tone, “that was the end of that friendship. He stayed on and finished school there, but my dad had me shipped back home. Wanted me to live the real American high school experience. Well, that and the fact that my mom got sick.”

In another bit of documentary trope, Laurens and Cooper are then seen in a car, driving down a country lane. They pass a sign that indicates they are not far from Charleston, South Carolina. The car pulls up in front of the gates to a large, plantation-like manor.

“This is home,” Laurens states, exiting the car. “Years one to twelve, then fourteen to eighteen. This was it.” From just the gate, he points out a few external features that have changed since he was last there over fifteen years ago. With a certain degree of fondness, he points out the woods where he would go exploring and recounts all the games of tag and make-believe he played with his younger siblings out on the massive lawn of the mansion.

“It’s weird seeing it after all this time. It’s foreign and familiar at the same time. It’s weirding me out,” he admits with a chuckle, “but that’s the same way it was when I got home from Geneva. I still knew this place like the back of my hand, but there was a crazy alien atmosphere to it, too. I couldn’t explain it at the time.”

If he believed in such things, Laurens begins, he would have thought it prophetic. Because, as he would soon learn, there was little comfort, much less familiarity, in the years to come.


	3. Act II, Scene II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> High school years and the horribleness that is love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for mentions of homophobia and mild abuse.

“I played baseball for a year,” Laurens says, sitting on the steps of his South Carolina high school, “mostly because my dad wanted me to do something all-American, and I’m just not football material. I was on the JV team, but I wasn’t crazy good or anything. I was a fast runner and that was it. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the game more, but at the time, not so much.” He walks down a row of lockers in a hallway and points out a side-by-side pair. “That one was mine, and that one was Mare’s.”

_Mare_ , in this case, is the nickname for Martha Manning, Laurens’ high school sweetheart (of a sort). The daughter of a first- and second-generation Filipino immigrant, respectively, Manning was one of the few people of color at the high school aside from Laurens himself.

“Would dear old dad have preferred if I dated a white girl? Probably a little bit,” Laurens remarks, “not that he would admit it to himself, much less out loud. But Mare and I, between the adjacent lockers and the shared schedule, became pretty fast friends. She was a bit like someone out of a cheesy teen movie or something, to be honest. We clicked well automatically and she was just perfect in my eye. We were like twins, some people said. Same mannerisms, same laugh, the same sense of humor, always together.”

However, being a JV athlete with a pretty, female best friend came at a cost to Laurens. Fellow baseball players would try and get him to admit he was dating Manning, and constant questions about the status of their relationship came from all sides. His friends, his family, and even his coach.

“Going back to the teen movie thing,” he says with a laugh, “my dad actually insisted that I go to the winter formal with Mare. I explained that I didn’t like her that way, and at first he said ‘fine, but at least take her as a friend. Just so you can get the experience.’ So I said whatever and agreed. Mare, of course, said yes, and it was cool. And then my mom, who was at the end at this point, started gushing about her baby boy growing up and getting his first girlfriend and whatnot, and at that point, I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise. And then, somewhere between the weeks before the winter formal and my mom’s death, Mare became my girlfriend.”

Pictures of a teenaged Laurens appear on the screen. Out of respect, all faces except his own are blurred. The scene shifts to Laurens and Cooper in a hotel lobby in Charleston, flipping through the pages of an old yearbook. Laurens points out photos of himself and old friends, giving brief anecdotes or descriptions with each one.

“Overall, school itself was good,” the voiceover begins, “it was just the high school years themselves that had dark points.”

“What, at home?” Cooper’s disembodied voice asks.

“Yeah. Dad didn’t take well to being thrown into the life of a single parent, so I took on a lot of responsibility in terms of my siblings. Coach let me go off baseball, and my teachers were all super understanding. Dad worked at all hours but insisted I have at least the slightest date/date night with Mare once a week, even if he _really_ needed me to watch my siblings. We could go out and take a walk in the woods for an hour and he’d be fine with it. Honestly,” he remarks with a dry chuckle, “it’s a little like my relationship with Alexander. We work almost constantly, but we make a point to do even the smallest thing together regularly. And anyway, that’s kind of aside the point. What I didn’t realize at the time is that my life had become a cycle of three things: school, family, Mare. I was too wrapped to notice before things went south.”

The scene returns to Mount Vernon, where Laurens is sitting on the porch with Eliza Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton, and _Story of Tonight_ castmates Tasha Tilghman and Charles Lee. Young Philip is asleep on his mother’s chest, even with the adults laughing and talking. The camera zooms in as Hamilton squeezes Laurens’ hand and presses a kiss into his hair. Laurens then replies with a kiss on the cheek and lays his head on Hamilton’s shoulder. Every atom of their beings appear to radiate love and joy, and the viewer is left with the impression that the rest of the world has slipped away from the two of them.

One of my coworkers actually started crying at this sight. Wiping away tears, they made a comment about how “disgustingly adorable” of a pair they are, followed by something along the lines of love so wholesome and pure being made illegal. Needless to say, this person spoke for everyone in the room in one way or another. I, personally, quite enjoy the concept of love, but my own crying would certainly come soon enough.

 

The sounds of the people on the porch and the day around them fade away, replaced with Laurens’ voiceover, though the image remains.

“Five months,” his voice says, tinged with sadness and guilt. “We were barely together for _five months_ before I knocked her up. And it’s not like I pressured her into [sex] or anything; she wanted it as much as any high school sophomore could. My father is known to this day to go back and forth on the matter of premarital sex, but he had a pretty black and white view of it with me. Honestly, I think he knew I was gay from pretty early on, and he did everything he could to repress it in me. I don’t know what he expected when he sent me to an all-boys school, but I did learn what happened to Francis. Apparently, when he came home for the holidays, he mentioned to a relative that he was interested in guys, and they spent the rest of the holidays hammering hateful rhetoric into him, hence why he was so distant and hostile when he got back. And his dad or something called up my old man to give him a ‘warning’, or whatever. I dunno.”

On the porch, Laurens is forced to let go of Hamilton’s hand when a Washington labradoodle runs up and starts licking him maliciously. The contrast between the voiceover’s resigned, heartbroken tone and the light, wholesome sight strikes an emotion deep inside with an uncanny accuracy. At this point, three of my coworkers were crying and another two had begun sniffling.

“Dad had been pushing me to date girls. He'd have friend's daughters come over for dinner or hire girls from my school to ‘help babysit my siblings’ when he had to work late. This started over the summer, but he got a little more persistent with each day until one day he sort of snapped.”

Now we see Laurens in costume, waiting in the wings of the _Story of Tonight_ stage. He shakes out his nerves, takes a deep breath, grins at the camera, then runs out. His other cast mates (Peggy Schuyler, Tasha Tilghman, Charles Lee, George Frederick III, and Sam Seabury) follow, giving waves or smiles as they pass in a flutter of bright fabric, long hair, and dazzling white grins.

“He came into my room one night, while my mom was in the hospital and my siblings had gone to bed. It starts off nice, like he’s apologizing for how uptight he’s been with the stress and all, and how it wasn’t fair to me. Me, I’m ready to go to bed, but he keeps talking. Says he’s sorry he’s been pushing the dating thing on me so hard, coming up with some B.S. on how my mom would want to see my first girlfriend before she goes - because at that point we all knew she wasn’t going to make it. Honestly, that was the first time that anyone dared say it aloud. And if that wasn’t a big enough blow, he follows it up with ‘and she will be a girlfriend’ in this low, kind of angry voice.”

A montage of soundless clips and photos from _Story of Tonight_ flips through as Laurens talks, further contrasting pain and sadness with pure, unadulterated joy.

“And then, out of nowhere, he starts yelling. Says I’ll date girls if he has to electrocute me into doing it, or that he’ll send me to a conversion counselor to ‘set me right’. And then he grabs me by the front of my shirt,” now we’re back to Laurens in the hotel, where he has the front of his own shirt bunched up in his hand to show Cooper, “brings me so close that I can’t look anywhere but in his eyes, and says that no son of his is going to be a - well, he used every slur in the book and then some. I was terrified. It tried to protest or deny it, but he shut me down. He said he knew what I was, and that my options were to ‘put a lid on it now or make me do it for you.’ Needless to say, I didn’t get any sleep that night.” Laurens takes a few shaky breaths before he continues talking.

In the weeks and months that followed, there was increasing tension between John Laurens and his father, particularly whenever girls were mentioned or simply nearby. Though not as verbal as before, Laurens felt very pressured by his father, who he says was watching his every move like a hawk.

“When I first started dating Mare, [Henry Laurens] was satisfied. I turned up the PDA whenever he was around, and that kept him sated for a while. Then, of course, as time went on, he began to see that I had some reservations. So we had another one of our before-bed chats. He grabbed me by the shirt again and told me that if Mare wanted to have sex with me, I was going to do it. And then he shoved me backward and I slipped and hit my head on the bed for good measure.”

Laurens says the blow to the head, though painful, was not severe until a few days later when he tripped going to get a glass of water in the middle of the night. By a horrible bit of chance, he ended up hitting his head in the exact same spot and ended up needing to go to the emergency room for stitches. To prove it, Laurens parted his trademark long, curly hair to point out a faded but distinct scar near the base of his skull.

“So yeah,” Laurens says with a dry chuckle, letting his hair back down, “when Mare said she wanted to do it, I wasn’t really in a position to argue. It only happened a few times - quite literally only three times - and we were always so scared of being caught that it never lasted that long, either.”

Nevertheless, it was enough.

“Mid or late April, I get called to the office and my dad and Mare’s parents are there. She’d been absent the last few days of school, and that got me seriously worried. From there, we all drove to her house together, where they sat me down and told me she was pregnant. Honest to God, I blacked out so hard that I don’t remember the events of the next eight hours.”

 


End file.
